Page 37

Twenty

Henry stared at the man-shaped thing in the doorway. It was looking at him.

“René?”

The figure stood perfectly still, its face hidden in the gathering darkness, but Henry knew René’s shape as well as he knew his own. He was afraid to move, afraid of scaring away whatever part of René stood before him now.

“They didn’t find it.” He kept his eyes on the thing in the doorway. “The art. It’s still here. It’s safe.”

The thing that looked like René did not move.

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you.” Henry felt the grief rise in his throat, hot and bitter. He thought he saw the figure’s head move just a little, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know how to talk to this thing that was not quite René. He tried to imagine what Fabienne would do.

“Is there something you need to tell me?” he asked.

He blinked, and the figure was gone.

He blinked again, and René was next to him, staring out the window. The air felt colder. Henry had to fight the urge to back away.

René looked like himself, and also nothing like himself at all.

He looked solid, but Henry knew that he wouldn’t be able to touch him.

To his relief, René appeared to be whole, and not the unrecognizable husk that he had buried just days before, and yet something about him looked profoundly lifeless.

Nothing like the robust, pink-cheeked man who had loved wine, and dirty jokes, and Gustav Klimt paintings.

That man was gone. This was something else entirely.

“René,” Henry said quietly. The figure blinked. “René, what do you need to tell me?”

The spirit stared at Henry. Later, Henry would recall that it didn’t speak at all, or if it did, it did not use words.

Images appeared in Henry’s mind, fragmented, like pieces of a puzzle.

They materialized there as if there were a film projector behind René’s milky eyes, playing a strange, silent film just for him.

He saw a road, one he recognized, leading into the distance.

There was a dead tree lying in a field with its roots above the ground, and then a farmhouse with a blue door, and a broken gate hanging half off its hinges.

And there was a feeling, a sense of danger and foreboding. Go there. Do not stay.

“Thank you.” Henry was shaking.

The spirit stared into his eyes, unseeing and uncomprehending. It did not reply. “René, I need to know. Rebecca and Lydia. Are they—”

But René was gone, and Henry was alone.

···

The next day he set out in Richard Boucher’s borrowed milk truck, traveling down the road he’d seen in his vision, with no idea what he was driving toward.

The temperature had dropped overnight, and half-hearted snow flurries danced across the road as he drove.

Overhead, the sky was a flat, gray void.

The first time he noticed someone staring, he didn’t pay them much mind.

He assumed it was because of the color of his skin.

On the side of the road, a middle-aged woman in a brown housedress stood very still and watched him pass.

The wind whipped her hair, half obscuring her face, but she didn’t seem to notice, and she never looked away.

The second time it was an elderly man, stooped and staring, exactly like the woman he’d seen a few miles earlier.

He tried to ignore the old man and focus on the road, but the dark stain on the front of the man’s shirt made him look again.

He told himself it could have been mud, or motor oil, but Henry had seen enough blood by now to know it when he saw it.

The next man was young, as young as Henry, with broad shoulders and a crop of straight blond hair like straw.

The man turned to watch Henry as he passed, and he saw that the man was missing half of his face.

Flesh hung in shreds from the exposed bone, and blood matted his blond hair against his skull.

A horrible emptiness sat where the left side of the man’s jaw should have been.

Henry waited until the man was out of sight, then pulled to the side of the road. He felt sick and lightheaded. He looked out across the field and saw more figures in the distance, standing still as posts in the howling wind.

He understood what was happening. He knew it in an awful, falling sort of way, like a thing you wish you could undo, but can’t.

You opened a door , a small voice inside him said. You don’t get to decide who comes through.

There in the stuffy cab of the truck, Henry felt the Grimorium Bellum sniffing at the air like an animal smelling blood.

···

He’d traveled only a few more miles before he came to a fork in the road and had to stop.

The hazy vision René had shared with him showed only the first part of the journey, but that familiar stretch of road was hours behind him, and now he didn’t know which way to go.

He looked around for some sign to guide him, but there was nothing—no fallen trees that he could see, no farmhouse with a blue door and a broken gate.

Nothing but empty road, stretching for miles in each direction.

Henry closed his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose to relieve the headache he felt coming on.

He opened his eyes, and there was a boy standing in the road.

He was certain there hadn’t been anyone there just a second before. The boy had simply appeared—gaunt and sallow, and no more than twelve years old. He stood perfectly still, dressed in summer clothes despite the cold. Henry could practically hear his mother’s voice inside his head.

When the dead tell you things, best you listen.

He let the engine idle as he stared at the boy, and the boy stared back.

“Goddamn it,” he whispered.

Henry turned off the engine and got out of the truck.

Very slowly, he approached the boy. As he got closer, he saw that the boy’s eyes looked like two silver cataracts, just like René’s had.

He didn’t fidget or look away, only stared as if he were a wax figure, but Henry was sure he saw something like recognition behind the boy’s milky eyes.

The hollows of his cheekbones were two empty craters.

The wind tugged at the boy’s threadbare shirt and trousers, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Hello?” Henry said.

The boy blinked but did not reply.

He tried again. “What’s your name?”

The boy looked momentarily stricken, like he couldn’t quite remember the answer, and it frightened him. Then the expression faded.

Henry swallowed, looking around. “I’m a little lost. Do you know a farmhouse with a blue door? Broken gate out front?”

Henry waited for a reply, but the boy only stared. He felt so helpless, watching the wind tear through the boy’s thin summer clothes. He wished he could have wrapped his coat around him, taken him someplace warm, given him something to eat.

“That’s okay,” he said softly. “I think it’s time for you to go home.”

The boy made a small movement that might have been a nod, or might have been nothing at all. Henry began to back away, unsure if he had helped or only made things worse. Then the boy spoke.

“North.”

Henry stopped. “What?”

The boy’s throat bobbed, like the words were crawling up toward his mouth from someplace deep inside. “The man said go north.”

His voice was strange and thin, like many voices all sighing and murmuring together, coming not from his throat, but from someplace else very far away. It was the voice more than anything that made Henry want to turn and run.

“What man?” Henry whispered.

The boy stared at him, and after a moment, Henry understood that he was not going to receive an answer. Perhaps the boy didn’t know himself.

“North. I will. Thank you. Go on home now, okay?”

He got back into the truck and started the engine.

As he drove, he saw the boy in his mirror, still watching the truck as it puttered away.

Henry kept looking back, hoping each time that the boy wouldn’t be there, but the fragile figure remained until he was just a speck in the distance, only disappearing when the horizon swallowed him up.

···

Henry drove north, watching his speed, keeping his eye out for Germans, and for the dead.

They were everywhere—old and young, some bloodied and broken, some looking as if they had just come from the market, their dazed expressions and unnatural stillness the only hint that there was anything unusual about them.

He could feel the book’s interest like hot breath on his neck.

Before, its presence had felt merely unsettling.

Now it seemed to howl and cry, shaking the windows, screaming for his attention.

Several times he was sure he saw a dark specter looming next to him, but when he turned his head, there was nothing there.

Henry held the wheel so tightly his fingers went numb.

He kept his eyes on the road, and away from the shade in the passenger seat.

It was nearly dark when the gas ran out and he felt the truck begin to sputter.

He pulled to the side of the road, cursing as the engine died.

The book seemed to sense his panic. It reached for him, whipping itself into a frenzy, but Henry refused to acknowledge the thing.

Outside the sky had gone an ominous slate gray, the half-bare trees twisting in the wind.